by J. Thorn
"You said that wasn’t it."
"Yes, that wasn’t it. After she disappeared completely I didn’t hear anything for months, but then one night as I slept I heard her voice in my dream. She was talking to me from wherever it was she had gone to."
"And where is that?"
"I don’t know. The conversations were never that clear, dream-like. I never heard her in the day, or even while taking a nap, it was always during deep sleep. She only came to me in my dreams."
"And then what?"
"I started having nightmares. I thought they were just bad dreams, but they weren’t. Strange visions of dark landscapes, monstrous creatures, just like she'd had before she went, and then I would hear her voice, far in the distance, calling out to me, but I could never find her, never catch up."
"That’s all I can tell you Reginald. I never found her in the dreams, never saw her alive again, and never spoke to her properly since that day."
"You’re telling me that if I slept in this house that I might be haunted by my wife?"
"I don’t know, it may be that she just haunts me, but maybe."
"How did you come to meet this demon that brought her too you?" I asked him.
"He came looking for me."
Sitting in the kitchen, my gun pointing at him, Laurence Miles was a different man, a troubled one. I don’t know if he ever really wanted to harm anyone by his actions, or whether his actions had been just the same as mine - the crazy acts of the desperate. In a way I guess he was just like me. His love for a woman had driven him to the extreme, and I hadn’t done much different had I? That didn’t change my hate for the man, but when it came down to it, I didn’t think I wanted to kill him.
"Are you going to kill me?" he asked.
I sat for a while, watching him, as he watched me, trying to decide what to do next. The man had stolen my wife from me, and lied to her, kept her for himself, and probably never once considered the pain and torment that he had left me with.
"No I’m not going to kill you. But you are going to sell me this house."
"The cottage? But it’s been in my family for generations. I don’t think I could."
"It’s your choice Laurence, but that is the price for your life. I will buy it for a fair price, and you will leave, never to come back here. If you don’t, then I guess I’ll be buying from the local authority when they claim the un-owned land, unless you have an heir?"
"No, no heir."
"Good, otherwise I would have to kill them too. I don’t really want to have to wait while they declare you missing and then dead, and trust me when I say that they won't find you."
Two weeks later I moved into Temperance Vale cottage. Laurence took his money and headed I don’t know where, back to London maybe, I didn’t care. I was just glad that he went. In the end he seemed relieved to be rid of the house, and even shook my hand before he climbed into the carriage that was sitting outside the front of the house, waiting to take him away. My last words to him were a warning to never return unless he wanted to die.
It was strange for a while. The house was quiet. I’m not sure what I was expecting when I slept there for the first time. A visit from an apparition of my wife, or strange other-worldly dreams? Maybe, but there was nothing.
The second day I walked down to the old ruins that were nestled half hidden in the trees down the slope towards the lake. I hadn’t been round all fourteen acres of the gardens yet, and when I came across the old chapel and the family graveyard in the bottom corner of the gardens, just where another path led off down to the lakeside, I was quite surprised.
I had a walk around the tiny, enclosed burial ground, and inside the building. Most of the graves had hard stone slabs pulled over the top of the earth, decorated, carved with flowers and other symbols, but one amongst them was just a simple headstone and grass. Carved into the stone was just one simple word, no epitaph, no last words, just the name.
Marie.
It must have been strange for him, for Laurence, to go through the pretence of burying her even though he knew that she wasn’t dead. I guess he had to go through it. Otherwise folks might have talked.
Apart from just two more momentary incidents, my strange experiences ended there in those gardens back in 1934. The first was ten years later, almost to the day.
They don’t always tell you everything in the newspapers. They don’t now, and they certainly never did back in 1944, during the Second World War.
The accounts were there of course. It was quite a while before I was back in London and able to find the time to read a newspaper, and when I was, the war had torn the city apart so badly that it was difficult to find a newspaper to read in the first place.
But it was there, glaring at me in black and white, somewhat slimmed down and hidden in a small column, right in the corner of the page, dwarfed by the invasion headlines.
I don’t think that I was the only one who saw it that day, but I’m pretty certain I was amongst a very few people. You see, D-Day was one of the most chaotic experiences of my life. I would imagine most people who were there would say the same thing, except their reasons would probably be very different to mine.
I was posted the year before onto HMS Warspite. I’d like to say I stood aboard that ship heroic and everything, but as part of the ships fire crew, standing up on the deck looking out across the Channel that day, I must profess it was one of the most terrifying and awe-inspiring moments of my life. When you are carrying a roll of fire blankets and a tool kit, it’s very hard not to feel small when faced with a sea full of ships, stretched out across the Channel as far as you can see. I was told afterwards that nearly seven thousand ships took to the sea that day, and I can well believe that. It was an amazing sight.
Early that morning, we started the bombardment of the coast. No, not the famous Omaha Beach that all those films are about, though that wasn’t too far along the coast from us. No, we were supporting the invasion of Sword Beach, which was further south, and as the time came for the landing craft to hit the shores, we were busy providing covering bombardment to try and pin down that damn defence line that was the bane of the invasion.
I had been in quite a few engagements aboard the ship during the war, but nothing compared to the bombardment we inflicted upon the coast that day.
Just before they sounded the all quiet, and the guns ceased firing, there was an accident up on the deck with one of the ammunition cases, and a fire broke out as a result of it. We got our alarm and went running across the ship as fast as we could.
It turned out it wasn’t an accident at all, but when ammunition for the guns was involved we had to presume the worst. It was nothing to do with ammunition when we arrived there. One of the smaller turrets had overheated and caused a bit of panic.
It was as I backed out of the firing bay that I saw it. The others in the crew were heading back into the ship as fast as they could go, and I was at the rear, moving slightly slower than the rest.
I was up on that small stretch of deck alone, and I caught a glimpse of the vast panorama that was the invasion fleet, all those hundreds of landing craft heading toward the shore. The air filled with a chilling silence as all the support ships ceased firing, allowing the landing craft the space to approach the beaches in those quiet few minutes, without fear of being hit by their own fleet as well as the enemy. The defence guns were still blazing but we were far enough out that the noise wasn’t that noticeable.
The fog and the rain that had been causing such poor visibility during the whole of the morning cleared, and the sun came out. For that brief time it was as though there was no war going on, and that the guns that had fallen into silence would never fire again.
This might sound like a surreal thing to experience, but it wasn’t the silencing of the guns, or the clearing of the weather that made my jaw almost hit the ground. It was what I saw in the water.
From my position up on that deck I had a pretty clear view of at least three quarters of the wa
ter surrounding the ship. I would say that very few people were looking where I was looking at the precise time something I’ve never been able to speak of before turned up at the Normandy landing.
I can only guess as to why it was then that it appeared, swimming underneath the ship. And my guess is the sheer volume of traffic across those waters, and the constant booming of the shore bombardment must have roused it from its sleep, because I sure as hell don’t think that anything quite like it would have ever been seen swimming in the waters on a nice summer day down at Brighton Beach.
No, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to hear that I was the only living human being ever to set eyes on it. Everybody with any sense was looking east, towards the coast, towards where every personal hell a man could have was coming true for many of those brave souls that would take to the beach during that miserable day.
What was strange about our guest? Well, let me tell you this. I think that if you took every ship on the ocean between England and France that day, and you placed them all together and bunched them up real close, the creature that I saw swimming away into the Atlantic Ocean, as quiet if it was just a six-pound cod, could have risen up and carried them all to America without even blinking an eye, if it even had any eyes.
When I first saw it at first, I thought that it was a shadow of a storm cloud, and one that had appeared right out of nowhere. But I glanced up at the sky, and frowned back down at the water, because like I said, the sky had cleared, and the sun was shining. I think it was only the glare from the sun piercing the sea and shining off that thing’s back that showed its presence at all.
It was gone as quickly as it had arrived, speeding off underneath the water, leaving just a little back current and a thin white line of foam as the ocean tried its best to handle something the size of a small island deciding to move faster than a ship.
No one from that day on ever mentioned seeing anything strange, and for fear of being ridiculed I never said a word to anyone, I just ducked through that doorway, back into the ship, and carried on about my duties, barely even thinking about the creature until the war was over and I was back onshore in London.
I was standing in Piccadilly, drinking a hot cup of broth and wondering what the hell I was going to do with myself now that the war was over, other than go home to Temperance Vale. I had found the remains of a half-decent copy of the newspaper from a few days after the landings. it was nearly a year old, and I didn’t expect to find anything in there, but damn it if I didn’t see a small caption, right in the corner.
Local folks along the southern coast and all the way up to Cornwall reported strange tidal-wave activity that lasted no more than an hour. Only a few small fishing boats were damaged.
I guess my friend took a trip all the way round the south coast and then took a left at Tintagel.
You know, the creature I saw in the water wasn’t the only leviathan present that day. You can’t but remember that beauty of a ship, Warspite. She was one of one of the most magnificent things to see.
Did you know there were seven other Warspites before that lady sped across the ocean? I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more.
She was a strong one as well, with a heart of fire. I heard a few years later that that old girl refused to crawl into the breaking yard and be torn apart. After all she had been through, they finally decided it was time to retire the old girl, but she wasn’t giving up, and certainly wasn’t being put down without one last show of strength. She grounded herself a few miles from the yard and forced them to take her apart piece by piece.
The one remaining moment, and it was just the slightest of moments, didn’t happen for another twenty-five years, in 1969.
Almost to the day that Marie had vanished on the banks of the canal, and so many years later, I think I caught a glimpse of another world.
I was nearly seventy years old, and my bones and muscles had started to show the signs of my age. For some reason I had taken to using the summerhouse to spend the day reading in. I would take some tea in a thermos, and some sandwiches, and walk the hundred yards down from the main house, to sit there for most of the day. I don’t think I ever did this consciously. Just one day I sat down in there and decided that I liked it. I imagine that this is what had happened to Marie those many years ago. She had found the summerhouse and taken to it.
It was something I did most days when the weather was good. Except this one day it had turned cold while I was down there, I thought a wind had come off the lake and skimmed up through the trees, but when I glanced down towards the lake, the sun was blaring down hot as anything. If you had been down by the lake that day you would be roasting.
Then as I turned back towards to my book, pulling my gown over my shoulders, I noticed something strange over near the ruins of the old house, something very odd.
All across the grass it was spreading, out from where the trees met the lawn, slowly creeping out like tendrils from the central point, the archway.
It was frost.
I put my books down, picked up my walking stick, and hobbled my way over to the edge of the lawn. Once there, I stood leaning on my stick to save me from falling over onto the grass, where I probably would never have managed to get up.
It was creeping out across the lawn, like a living thing, like an army of pure white ants making their way across some vast terrain. The edges split, and split again, long thin tendrils winding their way through the blades and across the lawn.
My eyes drifted upward towards the source, that old archway that had been there almost for ever, long before the manor house, dating back to god knows when. The stonework was so rough and chiselled it could have been millennia old.
The frost had nearly covered the ivy that grew up over the archway. The leaves were even now curling back in on themselves, strangled by the creeping cold. As I watched, the space between the ancient stonework burst into life, the brightness of the light almost blinding, causing me to look away for a moment before turning my gaze back.
There, between those ancient stones, was a view into another place. As I stood in awe, the landscape inside the archway changed. First it was a blur, a wavering mist, swirling and difficult to focus on, but then the mist settled.
All round the archway it was midsummer, the trees and the foliage were still green, life bursting forth, but between that curved stone barrier was a place of cold winter.
I could see a slope, leading down into a valley, similar to the one that swept away down into the lake, into those blue clear waters, but there in that small doorway was a frozen place, one that had no lake, no hills rising across the valley and into the fields beyond, no town of Temperance. No, in that place there were just endless dry, cold plains. The trees, what few there were, were dead and devoid of foliage. The ground was cracked, and frost coated the land for as far as I could see.
And then it was gone.
In the few moments that I had been given a glimpse of another place, in that short time that the door had been open to me, I had just stood and stared, unable to grasp what was before me, unable to act with what little time I had been offered.
The mists came once more, spewing out like the exhalation of a smoker’s breath, and then they were gone. I was left standing on that pathway, watching the frost slowly melt off the ivy, off the grass.
I took a careful step forward, wishing that I had it still in my bones to rush forward, to run through the door, through to that other place. Would I have been able to survive very long? Would I have just died there in the cold? I probably would have, but for a moment I had been given a glimpse of the place where Marie had gone, and I had failed to follow, failed to act, utterly failed to save her, and failed to at least go there and die the way she might have died. Of course, I didn’t believe she had even died. I thought that she had gone to that place to escape. To be finally free of her prison, the prison, whatever its nature, that kept her from leaving the grounds of the house. That prison that kept her memories from her.
Had she found them in there, in that barren wilderness? Had she somehow released herself? Or had she just taken a single step away from this world, only to find that the walls were just as high, just as forbidding, as they were here?
That was the last chance I ever had of finding out, and I didn’t take it. I was too slow to realise, and too old and frail to move like I might once have done. If only it had happened when I first bought the house from Laurence.
Too slow and too old.
Every day after that, I sat and watched that archway. Right up until the doctors told me that I was dying, and that soon I would be gone. They said it was hereditary, that my mind would slowly go, and with it the control of my body. I don’t know if that was true, but I do know that it wasn’t how my mother had died. I barely knew my father, so I couldn’t know if it was how he went.
I don't believe it myself, hereditary my ass.
My story ends here.
I can’t think of anything else to say, only that I have done things in my life that I’m not proud of, and have missed the chance to do things that I should have.
Sometimes life grabs you by the collar and reels you in, just puts you where you are supposed to be, shows you what you are supposed to do, and other times it just dangles the prize in front of you and laughs as you fail to notice. I failed to notice too many times I guess.
Maybe in death I might be with my Marie once more, maybe I can be with other folks that I remember from my life.
Looky and Winter, those two old soldiers from whom I had learned so much and listened to so little.
Joe Dean, who I wished so hard that I could find again, I’d dearly love to know what happened to him. Now maybe I will.
My mother, that lady who gave me life, the one that folks said was the nicest person they ever met, the one who I still feel I stole the life away from. I wish that had been different.